Mort was in the hospital for some stitches in his arm, the result of a freak accident involving a recumbent bicycle and a broken beer bottle--yeah, Mort wasn't sure how it had happened either.
His arm stitched up, he was now trying to find his way out of the hospital...unfortunately, he lacked a good sense of direction, and was now peering in patient rooms in the hopes of finding someone to give him directions. The occupants were either asleep or cranky, and he was having a hard time steeling himself to try again when he stuck his head into Norman's room.
"Um...excuse me?"

Norman had been gazing somewhat disconsolately at the ceiling. When Mort interrupted the staring contest, he gave a slight jolt, and turned his head to look. Someone had been nice enough to put his glasses on for him so that he could actually see. His gloomy expression became a puzzled one.

"Yes?" he replied.
I don't know this guy,... he must be looking for someone else.

"Um...hi. I thought you might be asleep. I'm...I'm lost. Do you know the way out of here?" Mort inquired timidly, keeping his gaze locked on the floor. With his luck (ha) he'd probably end up saying something stupid and offending another crazy person or something.

"I'm afraid not, sorry," Norm said sympathetically. A smirk lit his face. "If I did, I'd be out of here so fast."

The smirk faded.
"Only kidding, of course." As tempting as it would be to just leave, it would be more than a little stupid.
"Just,... keep going. I think this hall connects to the main one, but I'm really not sure."

"Why? Are you hurt really badly?" he took a hesitant step into the room. "What happened?" Looking around, he added, "There's no one here, aren't you lonely?"

"...Badly enough, I guess," he said mildly. A slight frown creased his forehead. When he next spoke it was with a sort of indifference. The rounds of questions he'd been asked had enabled him to distance himself from the what had happened, as if it had happened to someone else. "I was attacked."
He left out the "-and raped" because his visitor seemed rather young, and anyway it wasn't a detail that Norm thought anyone needed to know about.

He smirked again, and this time its warmth almost reached his eyes.
"...Yeah. A bit."

"I can stay here a while, if you want."
Without waiting for an answer, he came all the way into the room, pulled the chair up next to the bed, and sat down in it.
"I was attacked too."

"Heh. Thanks." Norm gave an earnest smile this time. His gaze followed Mort as he crossed the room, as if the boy might disappear if Norm stopped watching. Norm was lonelier than he'd let on - a few visits from from his few friends were nice, but not enough to compensate for the time he spent alone.
"What happened to you, then? Why'd you get attacked?"

"It's hard to explain...I mean, you'd think I was crazy. Maybe I am crazy. But...but I have something weird on my head." He'd combed his hair into a fluffy imitation of spikes, and hidden his antennae under it. "I think he did it because of that."

Norm peered suspiciously at Mort, his gaze searching for the weird thing on the boy's head that would cause someone to attack. He doesn't look crazy,... of course, I don't think I do either, but I'm pretty sure I am anyway.

"I don't see anything," he said finally. "What do you mean?"

"Do you promise not to freak out?" he bit his lip. He wasn't feeling too great about looking like a gigantic insect (as Fortuna had so tactfully put it) lately.
"Or sell me to a zoo or anything?"

"I won't freak out," Norm assured him, chuckling. "And no zoos, either. I wouldn't sell anyone to a zoo."
...
He grimaced. "...but... Just how weird are we talking? Mildly odd, or full-blown Ripley's Believe it or Not?"

"Full-blown. It's just not something people have on their heads. And it's not like...a prank, either. They grow there, I can feel them...m-maybe they're not real--" but Violet could see them, touch them... "--here."
He brushed his hair down with his hand, and then twitched the whole antenna so that it stood slightly out of his hair.

Norm stared at Mort for a moment, hs eyes slightly wider than they had been a few seconds ago. He closed his eyes and counted to three, then looked again. The antenna was still there. But it couldn't really be there... and since Mort had said it wasn't a prank, then...

"Yeah. You're crazy," he said. "Don't feel bad, though. I am too."

"I..."
Mort looked stricken...crushed.
"Y-you don't see them? They aren't there?"

"...I see them," Norm said, tense and hesitant. "But... but they aren't really there, you know. Because people don't have antennae. It's impossible. And if you're not kidding me and you think those things are really a part of you, then you must be crazy. And if I'm seeing them, I must be crazy too. But I already knew that."

He looked as if he was daring Mort to disagree with him. For a fraction of a second he thought he wanted to be proved wrong, but that idea quickly went away.

"But..." he blinked, confused. "Crazy people don't have the same hallucinations...and there was another, a girl, she saw them too...do you think I imagined her?"

"Maybe you did imagine her. It's not impossible," Norman said, determined not to think that the kid actually did have antennae. "I'm probably only thinking I see that weird thing on your head because you told me about it. I didn't see it before you said it was there."

"That's because I hid it under my hair, because this lady told my I looked like a bug." Mort sighed heavily. He didn't want to be crazy.
"...I know. I'll ask you something about them that I haven't told you. What if you're right? Then it isn't just suggestion, right?"

"I,... yeah, I guess so..." Norm nodded slowly, biting his lip. "Unless I just guess right,... but that's probably really unlikely."

He hesitated a moment, chewing his lower lip.
"...Okay. Ask away."

"How many are there?" he twitched them again so that the one tilted upward, and the stump of the other stuck straight into the air.

He peered at the antennae and counted them a few times, just to be sure.
"Well,... I see one, and a fraction of another one. So, sort of two, but not quite..."
Norm winced.
"That's wrong, right?"

"No, it's right." he fiddled with the whole one, frowning. "The guy who attacked me chopped the other one off."

Norm clamped his mouth shut, looking shocked, horrified, frightened, and (strangely enough) faintly pleased all at once.
"That can't be right," he mumbled. "You can't have those things on your head, ... humans don't have those..."

"I know," he replied, upset. "I don't know what they are, or where they came from...I didn't even feel them until the girl I met told me they were there...I thought that man had just cut off some of my hair, but he actually cut off one of...of these."

It was good (for both of them) that Mort seemed as mystified by the antennae as Norm was. Now that insanity had been pretty much ruled out, Norm was casting around for other rational explanations. It seemed to Norm that Mort was doing likewise - that was one of the only things keeping him from freaking out.

"Maybe he put them there in the first place and you just don't remember. Except I don't know where you'd find a big enough insect to transplant them. Or maybe they're synthetic, I've heard they can make all sort of artificial things now, like eye implants and those inner-ear implants and stuff..." Norm rambled. He wasn't joking around, but he didn't look as frightened as he had a moment ago, either.

Mort looked pretty on-edge himself. He'd gotten by these last few days by ignoring the antennae, but now that he thought about it...none of it made any sense.
"Why would he put something on me and then cut half of it off? And...and I can feel them, you know...is that even physically possible?"
He shuddered. He wouldn't put it past that man to implant weird things in him come to think of it.
"That guy was really weird, though...he had an operating table and scalpels and stuff in his basement like a mad scientist out of the movies."

"I don't know. Maybe it wasn't working properly," Norm suggested. "Iunno about feeling them,.. they have to be hard-wired into your brain for that to work, you can't just put in new pieces, there has to be a part of the brain set up for it. Like, from birth or something. Maybe you're some kinda mutant."
He grimaced.
"I mean that in the nicest way possible."
He bit on his lip, frowning once again. "You're serious?... There was really some guy wo just ... sheeeesh..."

"Yeah, like a horrible mutant insect thing..." he said dejectedly.
"Yep. He even started cutting my stomach open. When I woke up I was all sewed up. It still hurts a lot, and I get tired really fast. I don't think he took anything out, and I hope he didn't put anything in."

Norm winced in sympathy. The mad-scientist/doctor story was easy to believe now that he was convinced that Mort, for whatever reason, had antennae. "No, you look normal otherwise," he said, trying to be comforting, but just sounding dismissive. "He actually cut you open and sewed you up? Man. I hate stitches. Can't you just have one of the doctors here check it out, to make sure that he didn't do anything really weird to you?... "

"I don't want to." he said, a little too quickly. "They'd want to call the police, and they'd ask all kinds of questions...and they'd see these, and they'd think I was some kind of freak."
He wrapped his arms around himself, tipping forward in the chair.
"I am. I'm a freak."

He tilted his head slightly to one side, considering what Mort had said.
"Nah. You're not any more a freak than I am," Is that supposed to be a good thing? C'mon, you can do better than that. "Granted, you have feelers on your head -- as far as I can tell. But I didn't think you were a freak before you showed them to me, and I don't think so now, either."

A funny smirk lit his features.
"... What's your name, by the way? I almost forgot to ask."

Mort returned the smile hesitantly.
"Oh, sorry. It's Mortimer. You can call me Mort if you want, though. What's your name?"

"It's Norman. Nice to meet you," he nodded. The previous subjects of mutants and antennae and freaks seemed to have been forgotten. "Hey, what're you doing here, anyway? Obviously you didn't come to visit me. And - lucky you - you're finished with whatever you were in for and are on your way out..."

"Lucky me, huh? I came for more stitches. Some guy on a recumbent bike ran me over." He held out his newly repaired arm for Norm to see. "I'm having the worst luck lately."

"Ouch. Okay, definitely not lucky," Norm said emphatically, grimacing. "Mind explaining how that one happened?"

"I really am not sure..." he shrugged. "I was walking along, minding my own business, and then he swerved and knocked me over into some broken glass." he shrugged (even though he'd cried when it had happened). "It's not as bad as what happened to you."

"Still-- ouch." Norm said. He didn't comment or argue that what had happened to him wasn't worse than what had happened to Mort, mainly because he wanted to keep away from that topic. He cracked a wry smile. "Bet that didn't make it hurt any less at the time."

Mort smiled. He liked this guy, who seemed quite understanding, and didn't think he was a freak.
"Yeah. It scared me more than anything else, though."

"Heh. Yeah, I know what you mean. I started out scared,... but afterwards I had to remember that I should be, because I'd forgotten to. When you come down to it, there really isn't much to be afraid of, when it's all been done."
Isn't the expression supposed to be, 'When all's said and done'..?